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Thursday, September 8, 2011

exartech : Developer

The genius that is FWHE?

SEVERELY UNDERRATED DEVELOPER ALERTWith nearly six times more indev games than finished releases, Exartech is an experimental developer at heart. There's almost no games to play on his website, but that's perfectly fine, because browsing through his works in progress is enough of a trip as it is. Shown above is FWHE?, which is entirely incomplete (hardly started) but features by far one of the most kickass graphical styles I've ever seen, consisting solely of rectangles.

His most useful project is DND to GML, a tool that converts Game Maker's drag-and-drop icons into code. Useful because there literally isn't a day that goes by without someone asking how to do "this drag-and-drop stuff" in "this fancy code language thingo" and everyone shouts at them to read the manual. This is a Rosetta Stone for them. Infinitely useful.

Frizzd is his most complete game, a demake of Jesse "2DCube" Venbrux's Frozzd. The really stunning thing about it is how much it resembles the original. All of the graphics are drawn by hand. In MS Paint. Compare.

Can you even tell?

Lastly, probably his most finished WIP (lookie there an oxymoron): Vinman, basically Inspector Gadget with a deep prejudice against anything that moves. Very tight controls and a strange set of physics makes this thoroughly enjoyable. But the greatest thing about this is that the main character can do backflips. Not only that. He can bounce off of walls while he backflips. You wish you could do that.

Flamethrowers plus crosses?

The guy is underrated like mad and I recommend you check out some of his stuff. That is all.